DeepMind, the Google artificial intelligence division behind the champion-defeating AlphaGo bot, has revealed that it’s managed to create some of the most realistic, human level speech ever achieved from a machine. Called WaveNet, the new AI is said to act as a deep neural network that’s capable of generating speech by sampling real human speech and forming raw audio waveforms.

Earlier this year, the world went mad for bots when Facebook promised that a legion of automated assistants would help us tackle everyday life. Five months on, the company’s Messenger chief, David Marcus, has admitted that the idea “got really overhyped really, really quickly," and that the resulting bots have, so far, not performed too well. But there’s hope yet for these virtual assistants. A big turning point for Facebook’s bots is that they can now accept payments, which means that they can now get more things done. Meanwhile, in the same lab that created Siri, a new bot is being developed that will be able to sense your mood and respond accordingly. Using machine-learning, the system could learn to, say, slow down if you seem confused, or use different language if you appear frustrated. Which, for now, you probably are.

Google says its artificial intelligence has taught itself to 'translate between languages that it doesn't even know'

Google has built an algorithm that enables it to translate between languages that it doesn't know. The so-called 'zero-shot translation' technology is a self-taught method of translating whereby Google Brain - the research collaboration that ...

The Chinese Internet giant Tencent is entering the global AI race—and U.S. tech companies better watch out. The company, which develops the hugely popular social mobile apps WeChat and QQ, which both boast almost 900 million active users, established the lab earlier this year. But it’s now growing rapidly, and plans to start publishing original work next year. Baidu, China’s leading search engine, recently reaffirmed that it considers AI to be central to its future growth. A study by Japan's National Institute of Science and Technology Policy found China to be a close second to the U.S. in terms of the number of AI studies presented at top academic conferences in 2015. And a U.S. government report says that the number of papers published by Chinese researchers mentioning "deep learning" already exceeds the number published by U.S.researchers. "Ten years ago, you could say Chinese companies were copying from the U.S.," says Xing Yao, a vice president at Tencent. "As we develop, we are going from that to innovation."

Dubai Police launches new software to predict future crimesCrime Prediction was developed in support of the UAE’s Smart Governance Initiative; designed to predict where crime is likely to occur next.

Spandan Kar, head of SIME’s GIS Division, added: “This software is uniquely intelligent in its capability to accurately discern intricate patterns of criminal behaviour in seemingly unconnected events and then predict the probability of reoccurrence.

In 2014, Dubai Police issued detectives with Google Glass hands-free eyewear to help them fight crime using facial recognition technology.